We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver - Review

We Need to Talk About Kevin

by Lionel Shriver

The gripping international bestseller about motherhood gone awry.

Eva never really wanted to be a mother and certainly not the mother of the unlovable boy who murdered seven of his fellow high school students, a cafeteria worker, and a much-adored teacher who tried to befriend him, all two days before his sixteenth birthday. Now, two years later, it is time for her to come to terms with marriage, career, family, parenthood, and Kevin's horrific rampage in a series of startlingly direct correspondences with her estranged husband, Franklin. Uneasy with the sacrifices and social demotion of motherhood from the start, Eva fears that her alarming dislike for her own son may be responsible for driving him so nihilistically off the rails.

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My Review:

This was a very difficult book to review. I had so many conflict emotions while reading it, I was unsure what to say about it.

The first half of the book didn't go down very well, I constantly found myself putting the book down, and then going back and forth... I was THIS close to giving it up completely, but eventually I got used to the narrative from the mother's, Eva, point of view. An then I started to really enjoy it. That's the secret for this book, don't give up, it gets better. LOL

The book is a mixture of drama and horror, with small sprinkles of hope...

Kevin's life was incredibly... well, strange. He was strange from the beginning, but that's what made him so interesting. The way his mother describes him is very intimate, captivating and somewhat terrifying.

His coldness and heartlessness as a human being, very well displayed in certain terrible acts involving animals and people, brought to my fan girl's mind some of Stephen King's evilest characters ever.

The father's ignorance and denial were very unnerving. Okay, maybe it was just his way of coping, some people might say, I don't know. But in my oppinion, he could have been more supportive.

The little sister, the poor thing, was pitiful AND aggravating at the same time. It's hard for me to picture all she went throught just by this narrative alone, but I still can't accept how she never told anyone. Well, I also can't blame her, her brother must have terrorized her so bad, the poor thing was traumatized. (See? This is what I meant by mixed feelings. I feel sorry and mad at the same time.)

But, of course, the main focus was Kevin's relationship (?) with his mother. It had many highs and lows, and sometimes things looked like they would get better... but we know how it all ends.

A great book to try and understand the origins of a monster. It made me rethink my plans on having children in the future.